Dear New York Times: Why Are You Trying So Desperately to Defend Meat Eating on Ethical Grounds?Vegan Lifestyle Articles From All-Creatures.org

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If it’s so natural and normal and necessary, why does
the New York Times try to defend meat eating and the meat industry with many
elaborate, convoluted and often bizarre arguments from its panel of
“experts” in its recent forum on the subject?

Philosophy professor John Sanbonmatsu of Worcester
Polytechnic Institute submitted the following amazing letter to The New York
Times Magazine incorporating the concerns that many of us felt about the
contest and its judges.

Dear Editor,

We are a diverse group of scholars, researchers, and artists from such
disciplines as philosophy, women’s studies, sociology, law, political
theory, psychology, and literary studies, writing to take sharp issue with
the Magazine’s decision to run a “Defending Your Dinner” contest.

Do ethical vegetarians, a growing but still quite small percentage of the
population, pose such a “threat” to the meat and dairy industries that the
Times Magazine must now invite its millions of readers to shout them down?
Is the point of this contest really to open up honest debate about the meat
industry, or is the point, rather, to close it down?

We find it disturbing that the Magazine would organize such a one-sided
contest, and moreover that Ariel Kaminer should introduce it with such
frivolity. “Ethically speaking, vegetables get all the glory,” Kaminer
writes, caricaturing vegans as members of a “hard-core inner circle” who
have “dominated the discussion.” With her very breeziness (“Bon appetit!”),
Kaminer seems intent on trivializing the warrant for ethical veganism. A
more serious-minded critic would have given at least cursory attention to
the empirical basis of the position, namely, the known facts about animal
cognition and the unspeakable suffering that farmed animals endure so that
they can end up as meat on our plates.

First, there has been an explosion of scientific research in recent
decades showing beyond any doubt that many other species besides our own are
emotionally and cognitively complex. Farmed animals are capable of a wide
range of feelings and experiences, including empathy and the ability to
intuit the interior states of others. The evidence suggests that they
experience violence and trauma to their bodies as agonizingly as we do.

Second, most people are now aware of the horrific cruelty and violence
that goes on behind the locked doors of the meat industry. Billions of cows,
chickens, pigs, turkeys, geese, ducks, and aquaculture fish suffer each year
in abominable conditions, then are brutally slaughtered, many of them while
they are still fully or partially conscious. Such so-called factory farming
accounts for 99% of the meat consumed in our society. The mass slaughter of
oceanic fish, meanwhile, is so catastrophic to marine life that even the
Fisheries Centre of the University of British Columbia (the academic arm of
the Canadian fishing industry) has frankly compared today’s commercial
fishing campaigns to “wars of extermination.”

These and other facts have led a majority of contemporary moral
philosophers who have studied the question to conclude that killing animals
in order to eat them is not a morally defensible human interest, certainly
not in a society such as ours, where vegan alternatives are widely
available.

Even on purely prudential grounds, i.e. human self-interest, meat finds
no rational justification. Numerous studies have shown meat-based diets to
be associated with myriad negative health outcomes, including higher risks
of cardiovascular disease and cancer (to name but two). Meanwhile, animal
agriculture has proven to be an ecological and public health catastrophe,
poisoning human water supplies, destroying vast tracts of the rainforests of
Latin America, causing soil erosion, and creating dangerous new pathogens
like Avian Flu and Mad Cow Disease. Animal agriculture is also one of the
leading sources of global warming gas emissions.

Given these and many other facts demonstrating the nightmarish
consequences of the meat industry for humans and nonhumans alike, why has
the Magazine invited its readers to defend that industry, their essays to be
judged chiefly by proponents of “humane” meat eating?

Kaminer implies that she has assembled the most judicious and meat-averse
line-up of judges, a “murderer’s row” that will be hard to persuade of the
case for eating meat. But is that true? Michael Pollan promotes Joel Salatin
and other organic meat producers. Mark Bittman publishes meat recipes. Peter
Singer has consistently defended, in principle, the killing of nonhuman
beings for human purposes (provided that it be done “painlessly”). Jonathan
Safran Foer, in his otherwise admirable book “Eating Animals,” defends small
animal farms and backs away from open advocacy of vegetarianism. Only Andrew
Light seems to hold a position that finds no ethical justification for meat
eating.

So the contest’s overt bias (“Tell Us Why It’s Ethical to Eat Meat”) is
compounded by its pretense with respect to the judging. Kaminer might
instead have tapped any of dozens if not hundreds of prominent scholars,
writers, critics, and well-informed activists who unequivocally oppose meat
production for ethical reasons. The fact that she did not tells us
everything we need to know about how seriously Kaminer takes the “ethical”
issues at stake in this debate.

Kaminer’s lack of balance reveals itself further in her having stocked
her bench solely with men, when there are so many prominent feminist
theorists and writers available to provide a critique of our society’s
masculine penchant for organized violence against vulnerable populations,
whether against women and girls, foreign peoples, or other species.

There is an important debate to be had about the ethics of killing and
eating animals. But this is not the way to have it. Honest ethical inquiry
begins with the question, “How should we live?” or “What should I or we do
about ‘X’?” It does not begin with a predetermined conclusion, then work
backwards for justification. To throw down a rhetorical gauntlet–”Defend X
as a practice”– is not to open up an ethical conversation; it is to build
closure into the inquiry, and to stack the deck from the outset.

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